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Tag / Newspapers

Data journ­al­ism, news apps, open gov­ern­ment data. In this age of Anonym­ous, Wikileaks, and pro­act­ive sources pub­lish­ing freely avail­able data, it is becom­ing crit­ical that we have journ­al­ists and developers work­ing together to make sense of it all and under­stand how it affects us.

Today there are a grow­ing num­ber of news out­lets doing a fant­astic job of both pub­lish­ing data and cre­at­ing inter­ac­tions and visu­al­iz­a­tions to make sense of it. I wanted to show­case a hand­ful of those sites so that people can under­stand why this type of journ­al­ism is import­ant and how it works. And maybe even how to get involved if it’s of interest to you.

DATASETPROVIDERS:

There is no short­age of people provid­ing data sets today, the only thing to learn is how to nar­row it down to the most use­ful one for you.

Fin­gal Open Data is doing a nice job in Ire­land encour­aging coun­cils to open up their data. Their site http://data.fingal.ie/ provides data in CSV, XML and KML formats, and they’re cur­rently run­ning a com­pet­i­tion for people to build use­ful apps given the avail­able data.

I men­tioned The Guardian’s Data Blog in a recent post about news developer blogs as a great example of com­munity build­ing. But clearly it is also one of the best sources in the UK for a wide range of freely avail­able data sets. For each set of data they post, they offer a down­load of the data and recom­mend that if you do any­thing with it, you post it to their Flickr group. They often have addi­tional visu­al­iz­a­tions and com­par­is­ons as well.

It’s no coin­cid­ence that a lot of my news app examples have shown up in prior blog posts – there are some organ­iz­a­tions who are very ser­i­ously ahead of the pack in terms of under­stand­ing how news and tech­no­logy work together. On one hand I am delighted to have bright minds like these folks pav­ing the way! On the other hand, it makes me a little depressed when I real­ize that Ire­land is nowhere near this level of thinking.

NPR’s StateIm­pact (http://stateimpact.npr.org/) is a col­lab­or­a­tion among NPR and local pub­lic radio sta­tions in eight pilot states to exam­ine pub­lic policy issues in depth. They provide explan­at­ory, data-driven stor­ies focused on how people’s lives are affected by gov­ern­ment decisions.

The New York Times def­in­itely has a well-respected team of inter­act­ive news developers and infographic design­ers. How­ever it’s not always very easy to find them on their site. The Mul­ti­me­dia page is the best resource I’ve found for tak­ing a look at cool inter­act­ive apps and images they cre­ate, but Small labs Inc has also put together a nice col­lec­tion here: http://www.smallmeans.com/new-york-times-infographics/

The Chicago Tribune has some of the busiest & best news app build­ers in the United States today and they are con­stantly kick­ing out new, inter­est­ing inform­a­tion in nice visual formats. Check out their site which has apps in many areas includ­ing com­munity, schools, busi­ness, polit­ics and more.

ProP­ub­lica cre­ates not only fant­astic inter­act­ive news applic­a­tions like Dol­lars for Docs (which I ref­er­enced in my Quan­ti­fied Self talk on skin prob­lems), they also cre­ate excel­lent reusable tools like Doc­Diver that allow read­ers to work with the ProP­ub­lica reporters.

DATAJOURNALISMRESOURCES:

To learn more about data journ­al­ism, here are a few use­ful sites to check out and blogs to follow:

The Data Journ­al­ism Hand­book: a work-in-progress coordin­ated by the European Journ­al­ism Centre & the Open Know­ledge Found­a­tion launched at the Moz­illa Fest­ival in Lon­don on Novem­ber 5th 2011.

Hacks/Hackers: http://hackshackers.com A grass­roots journ­al­ism organ­iz­a­tion on a mis­sion to cre­ate a net­work of journ­al­ists and tech­no­lo­gists who rethink the future of news and information.

Also from Dan Nguyen, The Bas­tards Book of Ruby http://ruby.bastardsbook.com/ – an intro­duc­tion to pro­gram­ming and its prac­tical uses for journ­al­ists, research­ers, sci­ent­ists, ana­lysts and any­one else who needs to make sense of data.

When talk­ing about digital news apps, we often don’t think out­side the walls of writ­ten con­tent. How­ever radio and audio applic­a­tions also deliver news, stor­ies and enter­tain­ment to large audi­ences. There are excel­lent pod­casts in almost every cat­egory and their pop­ular­ity is grow­ing constantly.

Why would someone choose to listen to audio news instead of read­ing the same thing, espe­cially when you can prob­ably read faster than most speak­ers can deliver the same amount of inform­a­tion? Audio news apps are con­veni­ent, espe­cially for the increas­ing num­ber of long-haul com­muters. Audio apps let you multi-task (which is argu­ably a good thing). Listen­ing to a dis­cus­sion on a topic may be more insight­ful than an art­icle with one person’s point of view. Maybe our eyes get tired of look­ing at screens all day. And some­times it’s nice to listen to well-spoken people with pleas­ant voices.

I fell in love with Aud­ible a couple of years ago. They have a great selec­tion of books and reas­on­ably priced mem­ber­ship. But two things really sold me: 1) the con­veni­ence of being able to drop them onto my mp3 player and listen dur­ing com­mutes and travel and 2) the won­der­ful read­ers. Read­ing a David Sedaris book is always enter­tain­ing. Listen­ing to David Sedaris read you his book, while doing impres­sions of his sis­ters and his father, is like stand-up com­edy. Mal­colm Gladwell’s books become some­how more insight­ful when read by his calm and thought­ful voice.

So I have a thing for voices. Any­way, back to the apps and their pop­ular­ity. Today we’ll be cov­er­ing iPad audio news apps Stitcher, NPR, and RTÉ Radio News.

STITCHER

I learned about Stitcher a while back when I first found the Tech­Crunch Head­lines pod­cast (which Stitcher pro­duces). Stitcher is an app for stream­ing pod­casts, radio and news to mobile devices includ­ing iPhone, Android, iPad, Black­Berry and Palm. The app has a cata­logue of vari­ous pod­casts and chan­nels both on demand and live which users can sub­scribe to for free.

Open­ing Stitcher shows a nice, simple lay­out with some of the top news stor­ies, pop­u­lar chan­nels and new addi­tions on the right and basic nav­ig­a­tion on the left. Click­ing into a pod­cast or chan­nel starts it play­ing immediately.

For nav­ig­a­tion, the user can choose between OnDemand or Live Sta­tions. Once the user has found a pod­cast he likes, he can click the star icon to add it to the list of Favor­ites. Favor­ites stitches together playl­ists so users can simply click on Favor­ites and hear a stream of inter­est­ing content.

Indi­vidual epis­odes can also be book­marked, to save or listen later. The Favor­ites list refreshes the pod­casts every so often to make sure the epis­odes are the most recent ones.

Stitcher has done three things very, very well. First of all, they have tons of con­tent. By region, by interest, by source, they have cre­ated a very good dir­ect­ory of much of the top audio con­tent avail­able. Next they cre­ated nat­ive apps for mul­tiple plat­forms. So you can listen on many devices and get the same great exper­i­ence. Lastly they have kept the inter­face very clean and simple. There aren’t any instruc­tion pages here, no one needs them. The audio con­trols are always at the top, the nav­ig­a­tion always on the left, and the playl­ist or pod­cast detail always on the right. Very easy-to-use.

NPR

NPR, or National Pub­lic Radio, is a famil­iar enough name to most radio fans. They have built a large audi­ence for their pop­u­lar shows like Radiolab, All Things Con­sidered, Planet Money, On The Media and many more. NPR’s pro­gram­ming reaches a weekly audi­ence of 26+ mil­lion listen­ers, so they’re clearly cre­at­ing desir­able and inter­est­ing content.

NPR has done a fant­astic thing by cre­at­ing their COPE (Cre­ate Once, Pub­lish Every­where) sys­tem which allows other people to build on top of them and access their con­tent. This means that there are many dif­fer­ent people and organ­iz­a­tions push­ing NPR’s con­tent out for them, spread­ing the audio and pod­casts to vari­ous devices and plat­forms. They’re a very cre­at­ive organ­iz­a­tion when it comes to their tech­no­logy, and their iPad app, which was recently updated for iOS 5, is no exception.

When you launch the NPR iPad app, you have a lovely, easy-to-use inter­face show­ing you a selec­tion of record­ings and news with a radio player/navigation con­trol sec­tion at the bot­tom. To move between the dif­fer­ent chan­nels, there is a sort-of Flud-like, hori­zontal scroll with thumb­nails and short descrip­tions. For each item, you can choose to listen now or add it to your playlist.

If there are par­tic­u­lar pro­grams you reg­u­larly enjoy from NPR, you can find them by click­ing on the “Pro­grams” but­ton at the bot­tom and search by title or topic. Click­ing the heart icon adds it to your favor­ites on the left-hand column.

Click­ing on an indi­vidual pod­cast starts it play­ing in the radio player at the bot­tom of the app. You can altern­ately add it to your playl­ist & queue up sev­eral pod­casts. Some of the news stor­ies have writ­ten con­tent you can read and share, some only audio and no metadata. But the nav­ig­a­tion con­trols are rel­at­ively easy to use to find the pro­grams you want and listen live or on-demand.

NPR has an inter­est­ing advert­ising model as well – they inter­sperse occa­sional audio ads in between pro­grams or before cer­tain programs.

The only thing that doesn’t work out­side the US is the sta­tion finder. As it uses zip code look up, it can’t find any­thing near you if you’re out­side of the US. I’ve seen this as a prob­lem in many US-centric apps; for a long time try­ing to use geo­loca­tion on The Daily would simply crash the app.

RTÉRADIOPLAYER

It is dif­fi­cult to find a gen­eral “audio news” app that isn’t either full of con­tent spe­cific to the pro­du­cer (like NPR) or more of an aggreg­ator (like Stitcher). The RTÉ Radio Player is an example of a “local news chan­nel” app. Wherever you live, it’s pos­sible that a local media out­let is doing some­thing sim­ilar and provid­ing stream­ing, pod­cast feeds or an app for you to listen live or catch up on local news.

Upon open­ing the RTÉ Radio Player (which is land­scape view only), the live radio begins play­ing imme­di­ately. It starts in RTÉ Radio 1 stream­ing the live radio sta­tion. Under­neath a small sum­mary of the cur­rent play­ing pro­gram is a tabbed inter­face where users can select the sched­ule, web­site or pod­casts. There’s cur­rently an ad to the left which, if you click it, takes you to Safari and then imme­di­ately the App Store to down­load the same applic­a­tion again for some reason. But maybe it’s a rotat­ing ad and I just caught it on a bug.

The sched­ule link is a bit off-putting as it appears as though you could click on one of the pro­grams and start listen­ing to it, but it’s just a static list­ing of the pro­grams for that chan­nel. Click­ing back from the cur­rent day takes you to next week’s pro­grams, so there’s no way to look at the sched­ule from the pre­vi­ous day.

The web­site tab simply embeds the RTE web­site into a small view. You can increase the area by click­ing the up arrow icon on the right and nav­ig­ate around the web­site, but as it’s full-sized and con­tains flash ads, it’s a little bit shoe-horned in. It would be much more use­ful if it were stream­lined con­tent or maybe a mobile device-friendly ver­sion of the site.

On the pod­casts tab, you can select from things like most pop­u­lar, most recent or recom­men­ded and you can also search. While you’re presen­ted with only the last day or two worth of pod­casts, you can search and find much older record­ings if you’re look­ing for a spe­cific broad­cast. I did find it strange that while the pod­casts on most pop­u­lar and most recent seemed to play cor­rectly, click­ing on recom­men­ded pod­casts didn’t always play the pod­cast I clicked on. I am won­der­ing if it has to do with them being lis­ted but not yet uploaded for that day maybe?

To get back to live radio you can click the “Back to Live Radio” but­ton in the top right, which turns into a “Change Sta­tion” option when you’re listen­ing to the live radio chan­nel. So you can select that and switch from RTÉ Radio 1 to RTÉ 2fm, RTE Choice, etc. When you change chan­nels, the sched­ule and web­site tabs will update but the Pod­casts always con­tain a vari­ety from RTÉ Radio 1, RTÉ 2fm &RTÉ Raidió Na Gaeltachta.

SUMMARY

If you travel a lot or spend a lot of time already in front of bright screens, audio news may be a great option for you. Altern­ately it’s an excel­lent source of enter­tain­ment and edu­ca­tion. Whether you decide to go with an aggreg­ator or a local news out­let applic­a­tion depends a lot on the type of con­tent you prefer to hear. Think about your pref­er­ences and give one of the audio news apps a shot.

PODCASTRECOMMENDATIONS

As a pod­cast enthu­si­ast, I listen to quite a few dif­fer­ent pod­casts (mostly tech­no­logy). These days I primar­ily use Stitcher on my iPad, but I also use Zune soft­ware (yes, still) to sync my mp3 player and listen on my desktop com­puter. Any­thing to keep me away from try­ing to use iTunes for pod­casts, which I think is a miser­able piece of software.

A com­mon trait of suc­cess­ful online news and magazine sites is, sur­pris­ingly, a developer blog. Think of a developer blog as a look into the minds of the people build­ing the site: what lim­it­a­tions they have, what they’re work­ing on, what they believe their read­ers want or need, suc­cess stor­ies of how they built inter­est­ing things, and even day-to-day tid­bits that remind read­ers that the site is built by think­ing, feel­ing people instead of a face­less entity.

I’ve heard many excuses for not want­ing to have a developer blog: “Who would update the thing? Our team is busy!”“No one wants to read stuff like this, they want to read the news.”“We abso­lutely can­not pub­lish this inform­a­tion, it’s secret. What if someone were to copy us?!”“We’re developers, not writers. We wouldn’t know what to say.”“Tak­ing the time to write blog posts takes us away from being able to build the tech­no­logy our team needs.”The list goes on and on.

But for teams who do make the effort to cre­ate and update developer blogs, the rewards are great. I’m going to walk through some of the bene­fits of cre­at­ing a developer blog for your site, using excel­lent exist­ing blogs as examples of how to do this well.

EDUCATION

I believe very strongly that the best way to learn some­thing your­self is to teach oth­ers and share your know­ledge. This has become appar­ent to me from many dir­ec­tions includ­ing ment­or­ing, teach­ing, writ­ing tutori­als, giv­ing talks and train­ing oth­ers. I always learn more each time I share with others.

This industry moves so quickly. Sug­ges­tions on things that work and things that don’t as well as best prac­tices and “how to” art­icles are invalu­able for people. A solid “why we did it this way” or “the fast­est way to do x” type of art­icle can save other developers a great deal of time and make them etern­ally grate­ful to you. Google recently changed their Maps API Terms of Ser­vice, caus­ing a lot of con­fu­sion. Chris Keller from Madison.com wrote about the changes and nar­rowed down the import­ant bits for oth­ers affected by the change.

It might not hap­pen all the time, but occa­sion­ally your team may cre­ate new applic­a­tions or meth­ods of doing things which are so valu­able they’re worth selling or licens­ing. In 2005, The Lawrence Journal-World news­pa­per from Kan­sas released an open source tool called the Django web frame­work, and they ended up spin­ning out a soft­ware divi­sion to sell their cus­tom­ized CMS now called Elling­ton CMS. A CMS com­ing from a media organ­iz­a­tion is a huge deal, since every media team I talk to vehe­mently hates their CMS.

The ProP­ub­lica News Apps team released a new fea­ture earlier this month called Doc­Diver, and they announced this on their “ProP­ub­lica Nerd Blog.” The blog post included how it works, why they built it, and nerdy details on how it works. The pro­ject was built on top of the NYT Doc­u­mentViewer app and expands on that open source project.

KUDOSANDRECOGNITIONFORYOURTEAMMEMBERS

Recog­ni­tion and respect are two of the most import­ant things you can help your team mem­bers achieve. Developers and tech­no­lo­gists who feel appre­ci­ated are more likely to stick around, work harder and be more loyal employ­ees. Industry recog­ni­tion for your team circles back to help your organ­iz­a­tion improve its image as well.

The worst thing that can hap­pen to an industry is that it stag­nates and no innov­a­tion occurs. Developer blogs are the per­fect way to share your dis­rupt­ive ideas with oth­ers who might be inter­ested in doing some­thing sim­ilar or build­ing off of your idea.

What if you had a whole com­munity of indi­vidu­als you could get to give you input, sug­ges­tions, or even build things with your data and resources? Think of how much more you could achieve.

The Guard­ian’s Data Blog has done exactly that. A very act­ive blog, The Guard­ian Data Blog releases new sets of data con­stantly in raw form. Some­times they’ve been able to build charts or inter­ac­tions to tell a story with it, and some­times they simply provide the data. At the end of each art­icle, they ask “Can you do some­thing with this data?” and ask people to con­tact them or post visu­al­iz­a­tions on their Flickr page.

The res­ult is a fas­cin­at­ing body of work, which is much more diverse hav­ing com­munity input, and is def­in­itely lar­ger than what The Guard­ian could have pro­duced on its own. That kind of inter­ac­tion and ded­ic­a­tion by a com­munity makes your site and pub­lic­a­tion much more inter­est­ing and valuable.

SHOWOFFYOURCRAZYIDEAS

My dad used to tell me, “It ain’t brag­ging if you’ve done it.” If your team has built some­thing amaz­ing, solved a really tough prob­lem, or tried some­thing crazy (even if it was a colossal fail­ure!), why not tell the world? The New York Times launched its “beta620” labs pro­ject this year, and the site is spe­cific­ally for try­ing out wacky ideas and exper­i­ment­ing. So far they have cre­ated some pro­jects which are simply exper­i­ments they’ve learned from. But they’ve also cre­ated products like the Times Skim­mer, which end up as full-fledged products in the main site or in their mobile apps.

HIREBETTEREMPLOYEES

We all know hir­ing good developers, design­ers, UX design­ers, con­tent strategists and other tech­no­logy pos­i­tions is tough and get­ting tougher. People want to work for respec­ted organ­iz­a­tions doing inter­est­ing things. Advert­ising for free on your developer blog that you’re using new tech­no­logy or being cre­at­ive is a won­der­ful way to help the right people find their way to you.

At The Guard­ian, they have been host­ing “Guard­ian Hack Days” and “Developer drop-ins” this year, both of which help expose their team and tech­no­logy to poten­tially excel­lent can­did­ates for future hir­ing. A developer look­ing for his or her next role would find art­icles like these very telling about office cul­ture, pri­or­it­ies and work ethic, all things which are near impossible to dis­cover in an interview.

SUMMARY

If you’re con­sid­er­ing cre­at­ing a developer blog for your news or magazine applic­a­tion, be sure to keep an eye on the fol­low­ing blogs which are great examples of how to write, teach, influ­ence and share well:

In the last month we’ve had some news sources try­ing an uncon­ven­tional method of reach­ing new audi­ences: Face­book. “Go where your read­ers live” is the mes­sage of news applic­a­tions within Face­book, and there is cer­tainly no short­age of people who spend a sig­ni­fic­ant amount of time check­ing in on Face­book through­out the day, whether it is to update their own account or to see what’s going on with their friends and other businesses/events they fol­low. Today we’re look­ing at a few of these Facebook-integrated news apps, includ­ing WSJ Social by the Wall Street Journal, The Wash­ing­ton Post Social Reader, and The Guard­ian on Facebook.

WHYINSIDEOFFACEBOOK?

For com­pan­ies who need advert­ising rev­enue and care deeply about page impres­sions, length-of-time-on-site and other met­rics to share with their advert­isers, going to an external site and cre­at­ing a [free] pres­ence there seems like an odd strategy. But there are a few things Face­book offers com­pan­ies who want to build a reader on top of their plat­form. First of all, regard­ing ad rev­enue, all is not lost. Face­book can sell ad pos­i­tions around the app just like any of their other con­tent or pages. How­ever any ads appear­ing inside the app itself are rev­enue for the app cre­at­ors. Secondly, the shar­ing and social nature of Face­book allows extra, free pub­li­city. Read­ers can eas­ily share and recom­mend art­icles to their friends who may not be reg­u­lar read­ers of the pub­lic­a­tion and may take an interest, check out the art­icle, sub­scribe, etc. Basic­ally Face­book provides a large pop­u­la­tion of act­ively shar­ing, poten­tial readers.

Sub­scrip­tion costs and pay walls are still import­ant rev­enue con­cepts for news sites. While all of the apps dis­cussed below are free, it remains to be seen if they all stay that way. The WSJ Social indic­ates on their site that con­tent is cur­rently free for an undis­closed lim­ited time, cour­tesy of their launch spon­sor (Dell). As all three apps have links on each art­icle to view it on the ori­ginal site, I’m not sure what hap­pens if you do that and run into a pay wall.

WSJSOCIAL

WSJ Social launched about a month ago, right before Facebook’s developer con­fer­ence F8. Unlike other Face­book news apps like The Wash­ing­ton Post Social Reader, The WSJ Social was a Wall Street Journal-only pro­ject, not ini­ti­ated or oth­er­wise influ­enced by Face­book itself. The Wall Street Journal have made all con­tent from wsj.com avail­able on WSJ Social, which is sur­pris­ing to some, con­sid­er­ing their pay wall and sub­scrip­tion charges.

Click­ing on the WSJ Social app takes you to a Flipboard-style grid lay­out of art­icles, show­ing titles, images, icons of friends who may have read the art­icle, and com­ment / like counts. On the left you have a column of your “Top Edit­ors.” Click­ing on the Help & Inform­a­tion Cen­ter tells you that in WSJ Social, you and your friends are edit­ors, and your top edit­ors can be any­one you have chosen to add to your editor list, whether or not they are your Face­book friends. Click­ing the plus and minus but­tons adds and removes edit­ors, respectively.

The art­icle view is quite sim­ilar to the reg­u­lar web view, albeit a little less cluttered. It’s a cleaner feel, and a dis­tinct lack of “What’s pop­u­lar today” and “Most dis­cussed art­icles” type of con­tent blocks. You’ll see com­ments left by other Face­book users, and have the oppor­tun­ity to post com­ments to both the art­icle and your own Face­book feed.

THEWASHINGTONPOSTSOCIALREADER

The Wash­ing­ton Post Social Reader pulls its stor­ies both from its http://www.washingtonpost.com front page as well as its con­tent part­ners includ­ing The Asso­ci­ated Press, Reu­ters, Mash­able, Glob­al­Post, etc. Every per­son will see some­thing dif­fer­ent on the front page of the app, as the stor­ies shown reflect a user’s pro­file and likes as well as stor­ies read and liked by friends.

The top of the app is com­fort­able to read, show­ing a head­line story and two other top stor­ies. What fol­lows are two columns of art­icle head­lines, images and short descrip­tions, along with the art­icle source and timestamp. They show a small box on the right of trend­ing stor­ies, and on the left they show a column fea­tur­ing what friends are read­ing or have read. This column, powered by Trove, feels redund­ant, because at the same time you have Facebook’s column on the far right telling you what your friends are doing with apps right at this moment.

View­ing art­icles is a sim­ilar exper­i­ence to read­ing art­icles with the WSJ Social. The art­icle is gen­er­ally a cleaner ver­sion of the one on their site and has less dis­trac­tions, advert­ise­ments and unre­lated con­tent boxes. You can leave com­ments on the art­icle and your own Face­book wall.

THEGUARDIANONFACEBOOK

The Guard­ian is no stranger to new and inter­est­ing approaches to shar­ing their con­tent. Their app, which has the most users of the three, is a very dif­fer­ent style and looks more like it is actu­ally part of Face­book, pos­sibly due to the col­ours and fonts used.

The Guard­ian on Face­book fea­tures an activ­ity stream like the Wash­ing­ton Post Social Reader, show­ing what your friends have read recently. It has a 3-column box show­ing pop­u­lar con­tent right now, and a grid below of lar­ger images show­ing art­icles people are com­ment­ing on most recently. Under­neath that is an addi­tional grid of latest fea­tures and links to other Guard­ian Face­book pages.

Art­icle views are again cleaner. They show links to other stor­ies in the same cat­egory, fol­lowed by options to com­ment, recom­mend or altern­ately post your com­ment on The Guardian’s external site.

SIMILARTOMOBILEFIRSTAPPROACH

All three of these sites were able to reduce the amount of con­tent shown to improve the usab­il­ity of their Face­book app. Which leads me to believe they did some examin­ing of what people are actu­ally click­ing and read­ing and what people value on the external sites. This is the same thing that Luke W talks about in his excel­lent “Mobile First” talk, this idea that if we take out all of these things that aren’t the pri­or­ity and are left with some­thing great, doesn’t that tell us some­thing? Con­straints force people to pri­or­it­ize, and pri­or­it­iz­ing your users means mak­ing a smal­ler set of more pop­u­lar fea­tures bet­ter to use.

Inter­est­ingly enough, I was able to view the apps fine from the browser on my iPad (not iPhone or Win­dows Phone 7 though), but none of them show up in the “Apps” view on the Face­book mobile apps for iPhone or iPad.

AREPEOPLEUSINGTHEM?

The Guard­ian repor­ted their mil­lionth Face­book app sign up over the last week and seems to be grow­ing stead­ily. The Wash­ing­ton Post Social Reader and the WSJ Social, on the other hand, have a bit of a ways to go.

Not every Face­book user is happy with the idea of shar­ing every art­icle he or she reads, nor do friends neces­sar­ily want to see your detail­ing each story read. Pri­vacy and tedium are both con­cerns here. Michael Dono­hoe has a great post here about what hap­pens when your friends notice you are read­ing cer­tain things.

As with many Facebook-related things, there are pri­vacy con­trols so that users can block their friends see­ing cer­tain activ­it­ies or stop an app from post­ing to their timeline, but they may not be incred­ibly obvi­ous or easy to locate/use. It might be hours after your pro­file has shown that you’ve read a con­tro­ver­sial art­icle that you real­ize it was there, as it’s not always obvi­ous what gets pos­ted to your pro­file and what doesn’t. By that time, con­ser­vat­ive col­leagues will have already seen it. It depends how care­ful you are about lock­ing down your Face­book pro­file and whether you care about oth­ers know­ing what you’re reading.

SUMMARY

Facebook’s huge push at F8 of both their Social Graph and news apps using Face­book mean we will see more and more of these types of apps, espe­cially from media and news com­pan­ies look­ing for new audi­ences. It will be inter­est­ing to see stat­ist­ics on whether the “likes” and applic­a­tion users con­vert into sub­scrip­tions and/or traffic for the sites them­selves. In the mean­time I’d like to ask the news sites to con­sider that if the apps are in fact work­ing well, maybe it’s worth tak­ing some of the min­im­ized design from the apps back to their own sites to see if it makes a difference.

When iOS5 fea­tures were shown earlier this year at Apple’s WWDC, News­stand was one of the most inter­est­ing and talked about ideas. Now that iOS5 is live, it’s time to give it a test drive and see if it meets pub­lish­ers’ expectations.

Apple describes News­stand as “A cus­tom news­stand for all your sub­scrip­tions.” News­stand is more of a wood panel folder than an app on your device. Open­ing News­stand on your device will reveal any magazine or news­pa­per apps you have down­loaded. Alerts should tell you when new issues arrive, and a blue ban­ner should go across issues you haven’t yet read. New cov­ers should auto­mat­ic­ally update in the back­ground. This hasn’t been the case for me, how­ever, my cov­ers only seem to update when I launch the title, prompt­ing a new down­load and a cover update.

UPDATEDCOVERS

As I men­tion above, my cov­ers aren’t updat­ing in the back­ground by them­selves (maybe it’s a first-gen iPad thing?). But there is some­thing very nice about giv­ing pub­lish­ers the free­dom to not be restric­ted to a square icon for their cover. Magazines and news­pa­pers each have a very dif­fer­ent feel for their cover pages, so I love how, for example, Once Magazine’s cover shows up in land­scape mode, The New York Times looks like a NYT cover, and National Geo­graphic has its own famil­iar branding.

It feels a little weird that tap­ping that cover, for many magazines (not for news apps like The Daily and The New York Times), takes you not dir­ectly into the issue you just clicked, but rather into the magazine’s app where you can pur­chase or down­load more titles. I ran into a lot of crash­ing bugs as I was review­ing and prob­lems where every time I opened the app I had to re-download the cur­rent issue. I’m hop­ing these will get sor­ted out soon.

HOWDO I ADDNEWMAGAZINESORNEWSPAPERS?

Don’t yet have any­thing in your news­stand? You can get new magazines and news­pa­pers by click­ing the small “Store” but­ton when you open the News­stand folder, or you can visit the App Store. You can click on Categories->Newsstand or click the giant News­stand ban­ner on the front page to see all of your choices. Selec­tion isn’t amaz­ing just yet, but it’s new so I ima­gine a lot of pub­lish­ers are still final­iz­ing and test­ing their apps. You can get the big­ger, hyped apps like The Daily, The New York Times, The Guard­ian, Reader’s Digest and other titles. More will trickle in every week.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

News­stand strikes me as an odd name for this. News­stands in air­ports and train sta­tions are always bad news for my wal­let. I con­stantly find new titles, spot an eye-catching head­line and buy magazines I haven’t heard of. My iPad News­stand, how­ever, is a small col­lec­tion of stuff I already have spent money on. There isn’t any serendip­it­ous find­ing of excit­ing new authors or insights. It’s subtle, but this is more like my bed­side table or magazine rack in my office. A news­stand, to me, is an excit­ing place with oppor­tun­it­ies for dis­cov­ery (and, as I men­tioned, drop­ping lots of cash).

What would be more inter­est­ing for me (and cause me to spend more money) would be if there were an ele­ment of “You liked read­ing The New York Times recently, why not try The Guard­ian for iPad?”, ala Amazon recom­mend­a­tions. Maybe each time I open up the News­stand there are sug­ges­tions or notices about new titles or new issues. Right now it’s cum­ber­some and when I do make the effort, there just really isn’t that much I want to read. So per­haps as new titles are added to the col­lec­tion it will improve. I will wait and see. I do think they’re miss­ing a trick by mak­ing it a good five or six clicks to find some­thing new to buy, though.

SHOWMETHENUMBERS

It’s barely a week old, so it seems a bit early to expect that News­stand pres­ence would make a dent in anyone’s num­bers. At the same time, I men­tioned there aren’t many folks there so early adop­ters always have an advant­age of more eye­balls sooner.

Strangely enough, I notice I see barely any­thing in the News­stand Store on my iPad and iPhone, maybe 20 titles max. But if I look at News­stand on iTunes on my desktop, it lists many more titles. Per­haps there’s some admin work hap­pen­ing to make more things vis­ible in the device stores soon.

Future Pub­lish­ing seems to be happy with the num­bers so far any­way. They launched more than 50 titles last week and have seen more than two mil­lion down­loads in the four days they’ve been live.

There are plenty of app store ana­lyt­ics ser­vices you can use to track opens, down­loads, sub­scrip­tions. I don’t know if any of these have been enhanced (or shut down) with the launch of News­stand, so I will take a look and find out. A huge down­side to pub­lish­ers using the App Store is the lack of inform­a­tion about sub­scribers and cus­tom­ers. If Apple doesn’t assist with this prob­lem, there will likely be more pub­lish­ers going the way of the Fin­an­cial Times and build­ing web apps to main­tain bet­ter rela­tion­ships with their audience.

HOWTOGETMOREREADERS

One of the toughest things for con­sumers read­ing magazines on an iPad is know­ing whether they’re actu­ally going to enjoy read­ing it or whether they’ll look at it once, find it awk­ward or unus­able, and never open it again. A great edit­or­ial team also requires a great tech team to make it work. An excel­lent idea which many suc­cess­ful titles do is a free sample down­load so you can under­stand their app and con­tent. Wired does, National Geo­graphic does, Pro­ject does, and hope­fully most news and magazine apps will move in this dir­ec­tion soon.

Another thing to con­sider is offer­ing less choices. In a pro­ject I worked on recently, we had a lot of dis­cus­sions about price points. We ended up with two options, a monthly and an annual sub­scrip­tion. A sur­pris­ingly high num­ber of people opted imme­di­ately for the cheaper-in-the-long-run annual sub­scrip­tion. The more choices you offer the more you will con­fuse your cus­tomer, so pick one or two good value options and stick with them.

SUMMARY

The best thing about News­stand for pub­lish­ers is that it puts a reminder on the screen of every iOS device to read, sub­scribe, check out news and magazines. There are a lot more optim­iz­a­tions Apple can and should make to help pub­lish­ers sell more sub­scrip­tions such as recom­mend­a­tions and a “genius” type of search tool in the News­stand sec­tion of the App Store. With num­bers like Future has repor­ted, good things are in store for pub­lish­ers using Newsstand.

We’ve looked at a lot of digital ver­sions of their news­pa­per coun­ter­parts. Today instead we’re look­ing at news sources provid­ing their con­tent only online and not through any print formats. I’m examin­ing digital-only news sources The Daily, Newsy and New360.

THEDAILY

I was very excited for The Daily when it was announced. The first iPad-only news source, backed by Rupert Mur­doch, the first Apple-endorsed app to use the new App Store sub­scrip­tion model – it seemed like this was going to change the way that people viewed digital news and open the door for paid sub­scrip­tions to news and magazine apps which at the time were strug­gling to find con­sumers will­ing to pur­chase digital sub­scrip­tions. And they needed pay­ing sub­scribers (500,000 to be more pre­cise): they have a large team and their own reporters/journalists so the con­tent is original.

But the app was very heavy. The early ver­sions crashed fre­quently and took a long time to down­load each day’s edi­tion. There were bugs. It was slow. It crashed when it tried to detect my loc­a­tion (since I am out­side the US). Every few days, the app would for­get that I had a paid sub­scrip­tion & require me to sign up again, caus­ing me to fear I was being charged mul­tiple times. Even­tu­ally that annoy­ance and the focus on US news (there is still very little world news cov­er­age except for very big stor­ies) caused me to can­cel my subscription.

At SND last week, I learned that The Daily has a team of 50 design­ers to help lay out each day’s issue by hand, 100 pages in total. And then they do it again in land­scape mode. They have no auto­matic tem­plates. They use Adobe tools the whole way through up until they need to put it into the CMS and then rebuild it there. To me, this whole pro­cess sounds like a night­mare. An unsus­tain­able one at that.

But the pro of this pain­ful pro­cess is that The Daily has abso­lute free­dom to design how­ever they want, some­thing most pub­lish­ers can’t do from either a fin­an­cial or labour per­spect­ive. They can use things like Jamie Beck’s cinemagraphs. They can hand-code HTML5 anim­a­tions and trans­itions when they run into CMS lim­it­a­tions. They have free­dom to design and cus­tom­ize everything each day. That’s pretty amaz­ing, and some­thing I think a lot of pub­lish­ers would appre­ci­ate, espe­cially given that at every event I’ve been to this year, CMSs have been cited as pain­ful and lim­it­ing software.

With their cre­ativ­ity and design free­dom, The Daily design­ers have exper­i­mented with many inter­est­ing ideas. They have a carou­sel of image pages to use for nav­ig­a­tion, or you can use the nav­ig­a­tion links at the bot­tom. They now do a brief video report for each edi­tion describ­ing the day’s stor­ies. They have cool inter­act­ive fea­tures in cer­tain art­icles allow­ing the user to play or respond to a sur­vey or guess trivia. There’s a scroll bar at the top to move quickly around the issue and see thumb­nails of stories.

The Daily repor­ted last week that they have 80,000 pay­ing sub­scribers. Although it’s not even 20% of what they will need to even­tu­ally break even, it’s still an impress­ive num­ber, espe­cially given that they launched only back in Feb­ru­ary. Per­haps they will stream­line design to save money or per­haps the increase in iPad sales will spur fur­ther growth for them. For me, it’s an impress­ive design but not con­tent I’m inter­ested in. Plus it still crashes a lot for me.

Someone at SND (I think Josh Clark?) that there could be room for a model where people select and pay for the news they want. If this were the case, I might opt to pay for the arts, tech and news sec­tions. At least let me save the room on my iPad memory? After all, why force users to wait for the celebrity gos­sip sec­tion and sports sec­tion to down­load when they never intend to read those? It could be an inter­est­ing model to consider.

NEWSY

The novel idea about Newsy is that it is video-only news. I couldn’t verify with cer­tainty that it is the first video-only news site or app, but it’s the first one I have heard about. Newsy is multi-source and multi-platform, and it claims it is the only video news ser­vice that allows users to com­pare bias by high­light­ing nuances in reporting.

Newsy cur­rently works on iPhone, iPad, Android, and Black­berry. Plus their web­site has all of their con­tent as well.

How does Newsy work? Newsy takes vari­ous reports on the same sub­ject, from sources like MSNBC, ABC, The Huff­ing­ton Post, The Daily Beast, etc., and pro­duces short, pro­fes­sional video clips high­light­ing com­mon and dis­par­ate views from the vari­ous chan­nels. They provide addi­tional con­text and con­veni­ently merged video clips. Sources for each story are noted at the top of each video page.

Stor­ies fea­tured on Newsy come from their rotat­ing edit­or­ial team, who research blogs, news sites, magazines, tele­vi­sion and many other sources. They have their own tech­no­logy which can record as they do their research to help them put together the whole story when they feel they have a com­pre­hens­ive, bias-free view. View­ers are invited to com­ment on stor­ies and con­trib­ute as well.

Newsy is a refresh­ing look at world, US, polit­ical, busi­ness, tech, enter­tain­ment, sci­ence and sports news without a bias or an agenda. There are ads on their apps and web­site, but other than that I’m not sure what their rev­enue model is. They have been win­ning awards and get­ting great reviews, so I’m sure we’ll con­tinue to see them do inter­est­ing things.

NEWS360

If The Daily is the first iPad-only news and Newsy is the first video-only news, News360 has to be the first semantic ana­lysis news. While it sounds sim­ilar, it is actu­ally quite dif­fer­ent to some­thing like Zite or News.me. It’s hard to explain without using it.

News360 takes inform­a­tion from your social pro­files, gen­er­ates what it thinks are your interests (although you have a lot of gran­u­lar con­trol over this & can edit it fur­ther), and then provides you with a giant feed of stor­ies it thinks are inter­est­ing for you. The dif­fer­ence between this and some­thing like Zite is that it col­lects vari­ous sources for the same story and lets you read the ver­sion you want (or all of them).

For example, if I am read­ing about Steve Yegge’s Google+ post, I get options to read the ver­sion from the Inter­na­tional Busi­ness Times, The Register, Forbes.com, Wired News and 38 addi­tional sources for this story. Whew! Also inter­est­ing is that I get the abbre­vi­ated text in a nice, easy-to-read format, but I can see the ori­ginal as well by pulling up the source page below. I also get but­tons for shar­ing the art­icle on any of seven social net­works as well as high­light­ing the com­mon text for this article.

There’s some weird­ness in News360. Why do I need a URL to access my stor­ies? Why does it need per­mis­sion to post to my Twit­ter feed? Does it actu­ally get value from ana­lys­ing my Ever­note account? Does this pro­cess really “save hours of my life?”

But des­pite the long set-up time and con­fus­ing options, New360 provides a lot of news sources and a lot of art­icles rel­ev­ant to a user’s interests. If you’re a news nut and find your­self vis­it­ing lots of sites over the course of a day and re-reading the same art­icles, this app may help you focus on the unique stor­ies and then read the ver­sion that suits you (or all of them, if you need more info), ignor­ing a lot of duplication.

SUMMARY

The doom and gloom we keep hear­ing from the print media industry is def­in­itely depress­ing. I recently went to see Page One: Inside the New York Times and found the idea that people might stop pay­ing for invest­ig­at­ive journ­al­ism very scary. At the same time it is won­der­ful to see cre­at­ive minds build­ing apps like these to try to find new mod­els of gen­er­at­ing rev­enue for news and inform­a­tion. I also love that there is a focus on get­ting the story from sev­eral angles so as to remove bias and get the most cor­rect ver­sion. I real­ize this can­not hap­pen without either exclus­ive con­tracts or lack of pay wall, how­ever, so that is a chal­lenge. It will def­in­itely be inter­est­ing to see these apps con­tinue to grow.

The second day of SNDSTL had me over­whelmed. I listened to so many great speak­ers the pre­vi­ous day, learned so much, saw so many excel­lent demos. And now here I was with another great line-up of ses­sions to choose from.

Cross-Platform Edit­ing – Teresa Schmed­ding is the pres­id­ent of the Amer­ican Copy Edit­ors Soci­ety and also an assist­ant man­aging editor at the Daily Her­ald in Chicago. Teresa talked about try­ing to hold the line between edit­or­ial qual­ity and actu­ally get­ting stuff out the door. Her stor­ies of pet peeves of writers and edit­ors she’s dealt with were highly enter­tain­ing. It’s hard to know what’s worth fight­ing for. You will have read­ers who will write and com­plain about cer­tain edits so you have to know what your stand­ards are.

As someone who finds it near impossible to read blogs, web­sites, even Twit­ter feeds, and of course books and print media, with bad gram­mar and spelling, I sym­path­ize with these tough calls. I know care­less­ness can lose you readers.

Teresa’s top recom­mend­a­tions were three things: 1) Focus on gram­mar, it’s the most import­ant 2) Details: make sure you’ve got ‘em and they’re con­sist­entand3) Struc­ture: make sure it’s not con­fus­ing for the reader

Teresa recom­men­ded not to spend time on some of your old and time-consuming style rules, cer­tain old “news­pa­per” rules, and your boss’s pet peeves. Ask people, your read­ers, what they value so you can ensure you’re spend­ing time on what’s most import­ant to your read­ers. And if you’re think­ing about a pay wall, people will not pay for error-filled copy whether they are gram­mat­ical, spelling, or fact errors.

Design­ing a Respons­ive News Web­site – Every­one work­ing on the web at this point has to have seen the Boston Globe redesign at http://bostonglobe.com. Mir­anda Mul­ligan and Mat Mar­quis are two of the main folks behind the redesign. They talked very hon­estly about what went into the redesign, what was hard, what was valu­able and what pieces they’re still work­ing on. They described HTML5& Respons­ive Design and which pieces they wanted to incor­por­ate in their new site. They also showed us the grids they ended up using and how they worked with things like Scott Jehl’s Respons­ive Images script, media quer­ies and other tech­no­logy to make it work right.

Chal­lenges they came across included the Boston Globe masthead (very com­plic­ated & went through many revi­sions), third party integ­ra­tion for things like video and advert­ising, mak­ing HTML5 cross­word puzzles (this piece is cur­rently in beta), sav­ing off­line stor­ies, and inter­act­ive inform­a­tion graph­ics in respons­ive sites.

Also inter­est­ing to me was that they chose a new CMS and went with http://www.eidosmedia.com which is also used by the Den­ver Post, the New York Post and the Wash­ing­ton Post. It will take two years to imple­ment and cus­tom­ize, print products will launch on it next year.

Lastly they covered the import­ance of using ana­lyt­ics and allow­ing them to inform future decisions such as grid widths. Excel­lent and can­did talk about the real pain and equally real rewards of going through this process.

Gamestorm­ing with Dave Gray – I read Gamestorm­ing earlier this year and found it to be a very use­ful book for devel­op­ing ideas and work­ing on teams. Dave gave some examples from his book and how com­pan­ies like Star­bucks are listen­ing to cus­tom­ers and chan­ging their strategies for the better.

Dave poin­ted out that the ques­tion is no longer “What’s in tomorrow’s paper”, it’s now “What IS tomorrow’s paper?” Com­pan­ies who approach it this way will get it right faster than those who are cling­ing tightly to old mod­els that are going to slowly fade away.

The para­dox of dis­cov­ery is that you might not find what you’re look­ing for, but if you’re not look­ing for some­thing then you won’t find any­thing. If you’re look­ing for the ROI before you start any­thing, you’ll never build any­thing. You don’t have to be smart, you just have to do things.

How to Make News Apps in your News­room – Sev­eral times on this blog I’ve men­tioned the fact that try­ing lots of dif­fer­ent things and being able to work news, magazines and media more like an agile start-up is a great way to get ahead of the com­pet­i­tion. Brian Boyer from The Chicago Tribune and Scott Klein from ProP­ub­lica talked about news apps which are soft­ware. This is a new area, so these aren’t people in your com­pany who can fix your com­puter or get the server back online, they’re people who can build newly cap­able applic­a­tions to visu­al­ize stor­ies or inter­act with users.

Apps that fall into this cat­egory include things like “Dol­lars for Docs” from ProP­ub­lica, which points out doc­tors who have taken money or other com­pens­a­tion from phar­ma­ceut­ical com­pan­ies. The speak­ers poin­ted out we need “Demos not memos.” In other words, we need more people in the field who can help to visu­al­ize and dis­play and build these applications.

If you’re inter­ested in work­ing in this area, good places to start are things like Hacks & Hack­ers, NICAR-L mail­ing list, a lan­guage like Python or Ruby, a data­base like MySQL or Post­gr­eSQL, and inform­a­tional, how-to sites for web designers/developers like http://developer.mozilla.com and http://alistapart.com. Lots of other help­ful links are here on Brian’s pin­board site: http://bit.ly/sndnerd.

Find­ing the Web Designer Within – These two guys from Upstate­ment had amaz­ing slides that they pub­lished ahead of time so you could fol­low along. The slides are great because they point out that a lot of what news design­ers have been trained to do are very use­ful skills for web design. Things like grids, typo­graphy and being able to organ­ize volumes of inform­a­tion are all skills that can trans­fer to web design.

As with the pre­vi­ous speak­ers, they men­tion that it’s import­ant to teach your­self to code and recom­men­ded Coda. They design in the browser but still use InDes­ign occasionally.

Adios, Arial! New Tools for Tak­ing Beau­ti­ful Typo­graphy from Print to Digital – Typo­graphy is so import­ant for read­ab­il­ity on the web, and Alan Tam, Sam Ber­low and Danny DeBelius gave a great talk and examples on why you need to test every scen­ario, why the res­ults can change and some tech­no­logy to use to help. Sam recom­men­ded tools like the web font pre­view on http://www.fonts.com, the font­swap­per on http://www.webtype.com and http://fontfonter.com to try web fonts on any website.

Great fonts can render totally dif­fer­ently on dif­fer­ent oper­at­ing sys­tems, dif­fer­ent devices, dif­fer­ent browsers, so it’s import­ant to test the fonts you’ve selec­ted every­where. It’s also import­ant to make sure you’re using com­ple­ment­ary fonts, which is prob­ably hard to eye­ball unless you’re a very seasoned web font user.

Clos­ing Key­note with Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson – This present­a­tion was def­in­itely one you did not want to be late for. The ses­sion was live-streamed, and below is the video. Robin and Matt are amaz­ing speak­ers and it’s def­in­itely worth watch­ing their take on what the future of report­ing a nat­ural dis­aster might be like with their video called The Storm Col­lec­tion and the bril­liant talk that follows:

I’m very used to attend­ing tech­no­logy con­fer­ences with top­ics I’m more or less famil­iar with. It’s been a long time since I have been to an event where I felt that every talk I walked away from had new ideas and new things for me to learn. As I said in the begin­ning of this post, it’s over­whelm­ing. Although I’ve always been a news­pa­pers and magazine junkie, that’s not what I stud­ied in school. Without a journ­al­ism back­ground, I felt out of my ele­ment. It’s uncom­fort­able to be in that pos­i­tion, but I real­ize we prob­ably don’t do that enough to ourselves.

SNDSTL was incred­ibly well put together and I am so grate­ful to the organ­izers for all their hard work and effort. I will def­in­itely be attend­ing SND again in the future, hope to see every­one next year in Cleveland.

When your homet­own is in the Mid­w­est, you gen­er­ally don’t expect to get the oppor­tun­ity to fly there often for amaz­ing, cutting-edge, tech­no­logy and designy events. I was sur­prised that SND, the Soci­ety for News Design, was hav­ing their annual event in St. Louis, but even more sur­prised when I looked at the line-up and saw that it was quite a vis­ion­ary event, with speak­ers from Zite, Font Bur­eau and The Boston Globe and incred­ible folks like Josh Clark, Charles Apple, Dave Gray, and Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson giv­ing talks and speak­ing on pan­els. Every time I looked at the sched­ule I got excited. Plus the SNDSTL web­site was one of the best con­fer­ence sites I’ve ever seen.

So here’s a brief over­view of the event:

DATAVISUALIZATIONWORKSHOP

I had signed up for a pre-conference work­shop on data visu­al­iz­a­tion. Hav­ing done a gradu­ate course last year in design­ing and cre­at­ing data visu­al­iz­a­tions, I wasn’t sure how much of it would be duplic­ate, but I figured I could use a refresher. Plus the work­shop speak­ers were from The New York Times, Duke Uni­ver­sity and Invest­ig­at­ive Report­ers and Edit­ors, so these were people with some unbe­liev­able back­grounds and exper­i­ences. The work­shop was really good, and I walked away with some very use­ful resources. We spent time in Excel of course, but also Google Fusion Tables & Google Refine. We took a look at sev­eral open source tools I hadn’t heard of to bet­ter parse and mas­sage data. Lastly we looked at some pub­lic pro­jects from US news web­sites and their blog entries or over­views of how they built their solution.

Here is a list of some of the resources we walked through, I hadn’t heard of sev­eral of them so it was really help­ful for me.

The first day of the con­fer­ence star­ted with a latte and pump­kin gooey but­ter cake (a St. Louis spe­cialty) from Park Avenue Cof­fee around the corner from the venue. One thing I learned: journ­al­ism con­fer­ences do not have the abund­ance of cof­fee and baris­tas that I’m used to with tech conferences!

Mobile & Tab­let Research Roundup – This was an over­view of tab­let and mobile research by Roger Fidler & Regina McCombs. Some inter­est­ing stats from think­Mobile & Google research on how people are using smart phones

89% use it to stay con­nec­ted82% use it to read news and research75% use it to nav­ig­ate65% use it to keep enter­tained45% use it for man­age­ment and planning

Their research also showed that GPS is one of the most import­ant fea­tures for smart phone users, and good apps should incor­por­ate it appro­pri­ately. Social media comes in second in terms of fea­ture importance.

Tab­let ses­sions are long, 58% of people use it for an hour at a time, 30% use it for > 2 hours at a time. Daily.

What are they doing on the tab­lets? Using enga­ging, longer form, higher pro­duc­tion value applic­a­tions like games, magazines and video. News­pa­pers like the Daily Tele­graph found tab­let own­ers are not gen­er­ally inter­ested in break­ing news, more inter­ested in more detail and inter­act­ive pieces.

Fun101 — A strange title for a talk at a news design con­fer­ence, but Fun101 with Tim Har­rower was one of the best ses­sions I went to. Tim had amaz­ing ideas on how to engage read­ers, keep them inter­ested and get them to have fun. Which is espe­cially rel­ev­ant today with so much depress­ing news. Ideas Tim men­tioned included things like pre­dict­ing awards shows ahead of time, fun quizzes, games to tell news stor­ies, using com­ics to explain dif­fi­cult or com­plex stor­ies, and a lot more. I’m not see­ing his slides online, but you should def­in­itely check out his web­site for excel­lent and thought-provoking ideas and con­tent: http://www.timharrower.com/

Design­ing Per­son­al­ized Tab­let News – This was a panel with Bobby Ghoshal from Flud, Mark John­son from Zite & Joey Mar­bur­ger from Trove. It was a good panel where each aggreg­ator talked about their decisions on mul­tiple plat­forms, how much setup to give the user (i.e., do you seed them with feeds, let them choose, etc.), how they allow users to share, rev­enue streams and more. My takeaway from this was that these are in a dan­ger­ous spot as they rely a great deal on the lack of pay walls or a sys­tem to integ­rate with news sites. The aggreg­at­ors don’t want to do a ton of work for each site they allow their users to access so the tougher a news site’s pay wall, the more likely the aggreg­at­ors won’t include it. Hav­ing just seen the fant­astic film Page One: Inside the New York Times, I fear what could hap­pen if every­one stops pay­ing for news or thinks they’re entitled to qual­ity report­ing for free forever. So while the aggreg­at­ors do provide eye­balls, it seems there needs to be money chan­ging hands some­where for people to be able to use these apps. All three apps are cur­rently free, but it doesn’t seem to be a sus­tain­able model.

Key­note Speaker: Rob King – Rob King, VP& Editor-in-Chief of ESPN Digital Media gave a fant­astic talk on deal­ing with change in your per­sonal and pro­fes­sional life. My favour­ite quote: “It’s going to work out, you just don’t know how yet.” Brilliant.

Design­ing the Magazine and Issue-based Tab­let Exper­i­ence – This talk was given by Mike Schmidt from The Daily, Claus Ene­vold­sen from Next Issue Media and Robert New­man from Reader’s Digest. Very good ses­sion on the tools they use, how they spend their time and pro­duc­tion flow. I was ter­ri­fied to learn that at The Daily, there are 50 people on just the design team, and that they have no auto­matic tem­plates so every day they hand­craft over 100 pages. Then they do it again in por­trait mode. Yikes.

Touch­ing News: The New Rules of Tab­let Media – This ses­sion was one of the ones that made me sign up for this con­fer­ence. I read Josh Clark’s book Tap­worthy earlier this year and loved it. Josh had some of the best slides of the event, but he also auto­mated his Twit­ter account to tweet addi­tional inter­est­ing blurbs about his talk as he was speak­ing. Magic! Josh had excel­lent UI tips, usab­il­ity and inter­ac­tion examples, and was basic­ally all around bril­liant. Excel­lent speaker – go listen to him if he’s speak­ing near you any time soon. His beau­ti­ful slides are here: http://globalmoxie.com/jhc/prez/touching-news.pdf

Build­ing in HTML5& Bypassing Nat­ive Apps – I loved this ses­sion, not just a little because one of the developers from The Onion was speak­ing. Alan Herzber­ger from The Oklaho­man & Michael Wnuk from The Onion gave very hon­est over­views of why they chose to build with HTML5 instead of iOS and their internal pro­cesses that happened for design, devel­op­ment, CMS modi­fic­a­tion, etc. Very inter­est­ing and can­did dis­cus­sion about the pain they went through, what works and what doesn’t.

Visual Con­ceit: The Secret Ingredi­ent of the Secret Ingredi­ent – Adonis Durado has a tough job. As Design Dir­ector of two news­pa­pers in Oman, he works with designs and lay­outs in both Eng­lish and Arabic and has to deal with a very reserved audi­ence where show­ing skin to get more read­ers is not an option. Adonis talked about cre­at­ing pages and lay­outs that make people think and sur­prise them. He showed a lot of examples of his papers’ com­pel­ling designs and “Wow factor” cre­ations. He cited hir­ing a diverse team with dif­fer­ent back­grounds and voices as one of the defin­ing factors of his suc­cess­ful trans­form­a­tion of the papers from unknown to award-winning. His hand-out from the talk is here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/66821299/Visual-Conceit-Handout

ENDOFDAY 1

There were so many great talks, every ses­sion was a tough decision but I was quite happy with how much I learned. Links to other speak­ers plus slides and blogs can be found here: http://sndstl.com/2011/09/snd-stl-take-aways/

Last week’s look at Irish News­pa­per web­sites and applic­a­tions was a bit depress­ing. So this week, I’m look­ing at some of the newer and more tech-friendly altern­at­ives: TheJournal.ie and Story­ful. Neither of these news sources have altern­at­ive print formats, they are both digital-only.

THEJOURNAL.IE

TheJournal.ie is an Irish news web­site which invites users to “shape the news agenda.” Pro­duced and owned by Dis­tilled Media, TheJournal.ie has part­ner sites for busi­ness, sports and enter­tain­ment news as well (all linked in the top nav­ig­a­tion bar). While it’s been around since early 2010, TheJournal.ie is cur­rently in pub­lic beta. This means the site is vis­ible to the gen­eral pub­lic, although it may con­tinue to test and trial new fea­tures so there may be glitches or new bits and pieces from time to time.

TheJournal.ie’s front page is a mod­ern and less formal site powered by Word­Press. It is attract­ive and easy to nav­ig­ate. The tagged thumb­nails and sum­mar­ies are great and make it easy to browse head­lines and stor­ies. My only com­plaint is that some of the anim­ated advert­ise­ments on the front page, like the Fine Gael one above are quite jit­tery and take away from the abil­ity to pay atten­tion to the head­lines & sum­mar­ies. Other advert­ise­ments I’ve seen on the site are much nicer, not­ably the ones pro­duced by other Dis­tilled Media sites like boards.ie.

The “Trend­ing tags” link at the top of the front page (and also waaaayyyy at the bot­tom) shows off TheJournal.ie’s abil­ity to do some­thing most other Irish news­pa­per sites can’t/don’t: tag­ging art­icles.* Click­ing one of the trend­ing tags shows a list of art­icles rel­ev­ant to that tag, when the art­icle was pos­ted, how many views & com­ments it has had, a brief sum­mary and quick links to share via Face­book and Twitter.

TheJournal.ie has a mobile ver­sion of their web­site which can be accessed at http://m.thejournal.ie or by click­ing the link at the bot­tom of the main page as shown above.

The mobile web­site is excel­lent and stream­lined, focus­ing on the top main story and the most recent stor­ies with a small down­ward arrow icon to allow the user to switch to one of the dif­fer­ent online prop­er­ties. As the list of art­icles is long, it can take a bit of scrolling to get to things like trend­ing tags or most com­men­ted art­icles. The art­icles them­selves are fant­astic, very easy to read with nice typo­graphy and images. I tried the mobile site on both an iPhone and a Win­dows Phone 7 and both looked great.

As far as apps go, The­Journal hardly needs any because the mobile site works so well. How­ever the iOS apps add a nice nav­ig­a­tion bar at the bot­tom for Latest, Most Pop­u­lar, Opin­ion, More and timely events like the Rugby World Cup. But the best part about the iOS app, which they should def­in­itely advert­ise more loudly, is the off­line cap­ab­il­ity. The app allows a user to down­load between 30–120 art­icles and their images so that you can read while off­line. I tried this while in air­plane mode on my flight today and it was great, the only things inac­cess­ible are of course online videos.

Nav­ig­a­tion in the iOS app takes a little bit of get­ting used to, you can scroll through the art­icles and swipe or tap the sides to move to the pre­vi­ous or next art­icle. The Search func­tion is hid­den in the “More” sec­tion. It might be more use­ful on the main nav­ig­a­tion or if the tags are suf­fi­cient for most users, it could prob­ably be removed.

Although TheJournal.ie is still rel­at­ively new, it boasts over 800,000 monthly vis­it­ors, 60,000 read­ers on the Android & iOS apps, and an addi­tional 80,000 Face­book & 20,000 Twit­ter fol­low­ers. Very impress­ive stats for a group that has to com­pete with more estab­lished and famil­iar Irish news sources. I am con­fid­ent that TheJournal.ie will con­tinue to grow and increase its pres­ence and influ­ence in the Irish news space. I would def­in­itely not be sur­prised if this was a model they could abstract out and license to other areas sim­ilar to Ire­land where the main news sites are more old school and less adaptive.

STORYFUL.COM

Story­ful, now a little over one year old, uses a dif­fer­ent approach to TheJournal.ie and most other news web­sites by tak­ing the per­spect­ive that there is always someone closer to the story. Sources might be local news pro­fes­sion­als or ama­teurs, but they’re often simply reg­u­lar people who are in the right place at the right time.

Story­ful has a “story­build­ing tool” on their site which allows users to pub­lish dir­ectly to the web­site. Users can post to com­munity pages and share stor­ies with friends on Face­book and Twit­ter to reach an audi­ence all around the world. It’s a unique model which allows Story­ful to share the stor­ies it col­lects with news sources and major global news organ­iz­a­tions all over the world.

Nav­ig­at­ing Storyful’s web­site is not incred­ibly obvi­ous if you’re look­ing for a more stand­ard style of news web­site. Storyful’s front page presents a few thumb­nails of what’s hap­pen­ing now along with things like Around the World in 18 Tweets and real-time Twit­ter updates. Towards the bot­tom it has reg­u­lar spots like Curator’s Choice and Com­munity Stor­ies which high­light spe­cific­ally chosen stor­ies. How­ever if you’re look­ing for a story that happened yes­ter­day or some gen­eral news head­lines for European fin­an­cial stor­ies, it’s not really built for that style of nav­ig­a­tion. You can use the search bar to search by topic, but Story­ful is not “the daily news­pa­per.” Story­ful is latest news, world­wide news, told by cour­ageous people affected by the story. If you want great storytelling and fas­cin­at­ing insights and the most up-to-date devel­op­ments, this is the place. If you want stock clos­ing prices and the sports scores from yes­ter­day, you’re prob­ably bet­ter off on a more tra­di­tional news website.

Story­ful has a vibrant com­munity of con­trib­ut­ors, and their con­tri­bu­tions are in vari­ous lan­guages, accom­pan­ied with pho­tos, videos, tweets and com­ments, often from people at the scene of unfold­ing break­ing news. There is no other way to feel closer to a brand new story than by watch­ing these posts get put together and read­ing what devel­ops. I know the feel­ing of con­tinu­ally refresh­ing Twit­ter searches for break­ing news like the Arab Spring events and Lon­don Riots because no news site is going to have the latest turn of events, and feel­ing thrown into the moment while read­ing quotes from people who are wit­ness­ing it hap­pen. Read­ing a great Story­ful item is a bit like that, but much bet­ter organ­ized and with sup­port­ing media.

There is no http://m.storyful.com, and unfor­tu­nately it doesn’t adapt much for smal­ler screen sizes, so if you are using it on a phone you will have to do some pan­ning and zoom­ing. How­ever it looks decent on an iPad, bet­ter in land­scape mode than in por­trait mode, which leaves a lot of unused whitespace at the bot­tom. There are def­in­itely some optim­iz­a­tions Story­ful could do for mobile devices and smal­ler screens, a respons­ive lay­out being one. Another thing that might be use­ful is be a “snap-and-upload” instant story cre­ation tool. With Storyful’s audi­ence being world­wide, they’ve done the right thing by avoid­ing mobile apps and just focus­ing on the web­site to reach the most people. Many poorer and rural areas use very bare­bones phones but can still access the web with them; allow­ing these would-be report­ers to main­tain access to the story build­ing tool is key. It would also be inter­est­ing to see geo­loca­tion func­tion­al­ity here, some­thing like a “Break­ing news near me” type of option.

Some­thing Story­ful got right that no one else has yet in Ire­land is the per­sonal, behind-the-scenes con­nec­tion from their blog at http://blog.storyful.com/. This is a great way to show upcom­ing devel­op­ments, share what’s new and how it works if rel­ev­ant, show­case insights gained from ana­lyt­ics and user feed­back and just gen­er­ally let users under­stand the folks behind the cre­ation of the site a little bet­ter. Storyful’s blog has bits and pieces about recent stor­ies they’ve pos­ted, but it also has some very insight­ful posts on how and why it works the way it does. I look for­ward to see­ing more Irish news sites fol­low their lead and be more trans­par­ent about their inner workings.

SUMMARY

This area is so fas­cin­at­ing to watch because without the bag­gage of an exist­ing brand, new news sources can do some very inter­est­ing things. Things like Face­book and Twit­ter integ­ra­tion are not mere add-ons for these sites, they’re integ­ral to how the sites work. Embra­cing new ways of com­mu­nic­at­ing and shar­ing helps these sites to grow their audi­ence, and in a time where ad spend is vital to sur­vival, audi­ence stat­ist­ics will go a long way to build­ing and keep­ing advert­iser revenue.

Look­ing at Google Trends is one way to see gen­eral traffic over time, and you can see below that for 2011, traffic is decreas­ing slightly to big­ger sites while jump­ing around but still slowly increas­ing over time for TheJournal.ie (Story­ful stats were unavail­able so they’re not on the chart). These are very forward-thinking organ­iz­a­tions and I applaud their hard work and determ­in­a­tion to break the status quo.

*Unless you’re talk­ing about The Independent’s ran­dom high­light­ing of words inside art­icles, which is very bizarre and cer­tainly not help­ful. I was read­ing a food art­icle recently which had two hyper­links in it: path and tricky. Click­ing either word took you to a page where any other art­icles con­tain­ing the word path or tricky were lis­ted. Why would that ever be use­ful? The Inde­pend­ent needs to lose that auto­matic link­ing, whatever it is.

A few weeks ago, I did an ana­lysis of some world­wide news source apps and web­sites, one of which was The Irish Times. Appar­ently many people had not seen The Irish Times’ iOS app and I received a lot of feed­back from people on the blog, on Twit­ter and in per­son express­ing dis­ap­point­ment and, in one instance, embar­rass­ment, in local news­pa­pers’ lack of tech savvy and design.

I wanted to know if The Irish Times were unique in their approach and who in the Irish news­pa­per scene was cre­at­ing the most cutting-edge and user-friendly exper­i­ences. Today I’m look­ing at the other two big, daily Irish broad­sheet news­pa­pers, The Irish Inde­pend­ent and The Irish Exam­iner, and next time I’ll cover some of the newer, digital-only initiatives.

THEIRISHINDEPENDENT

The Irish Inde­pend­ent was formed in 1905 as the dir­ect suc­cessor to the Daily Irish Inde­pend­ent. Today it is pub­lished daily by Inde­pend­ent News and Media (INM), an inter­na­tional news­pa­per and com­mu­nic­a­tions group. Inde­pend­ent Digital is the digital con­sumer divi­sion of INM and oper­ates web­sites such as Independent.ie, and Herald.ie, with Independent.ie being the flag­ship brand.

Look­ing at The Irish Inde­pend­ent’s web­site, my first thought was, “Thank good­ness they have an iPad app”(this turned out not to be as big of a relief, but more on that later). There is just so much con­tent and so many ways to read it, and the site does not adjust well for an iPad-sized device. Try­ing to nav­ig­ate to http://m.independent.ie gives you the fol­low­ing error.

On the bot­tom of the front page of the main site (and you do have to scroll for a while, there is a lot of con­tent there!) you’ll see this:

which shows you that you do have some options to view using mobile devices. The RSS page has links to feeds for basic­ally every cat­egory such as Per­sonal Fin­ance, Horse Racing, European News, etc. The Mobile page lists their vari­ous cus­tom apps, includ­ing iPhone, Nokia, Sam­sung Wave (!) and iPad ver­sions. I looked on the Win­dows Phone Mar­ket­place as well but didn’t see any offi­cial or unof­fi­cial Inde­pend­ent apps (WP7 developers, take note!).

Unfor­tu­nately, the Irish Inde­pend­ent is using the same soft­ware The Irish Times are using for their iPad app. I really hope this isn’t set­ting the pre­ced­ent for Irish news exper­i­ences, that would be so sad. The sil­ver lin­ing is that since both of these apps use external pay­ment sys­tems, it’s just a mat­ter of time before they’re kicked out of the App Store for viol­at­ing Apple terms and con­di­tions. Whether they’ll adapt the soft­ware they use to work with Apple’s in-app sub­scrip­tion pur­chases or aban­don it and try some­thing else remains to be seen. I do hope that the num­bers tell the right story for both news­pa­pers and they try a dif­fer­ent, more appro­pri­ate approach for the iPad rather than decid­ing that “people aren’t spend­ing money on news apps”, as that is def­in­itely not the case.

The sad thing about the iPad app is that the iPhone app is so much bet­ter. Con­tain­ing the most pop­u­lar sec­tions of The Irish Inde­pend­ent’s web­site, the iPhone app has access to break­ing news, busi­ness, sport, enter­tain­ment, travel, health and oth­ers. Users can cus­tom­ize the menu bar with their favour­ite sec­tions, and the app can be synched so that the user can read off­line later.

If you don’t have a com­pat­ible mobile device and you’re not an RSS user, The Irish Inde­pend­ent also offer e-mail updates and Face­book integ­ra­tion. The news­let­ter pro­cess is maybe a bit long with four sep­ar­ate screens, but the e-mails are nicely format­ted and con­tain a large amount of news con­tent from vari­ous categories.

There is such a wide vari­ety of approaches by The Irish Inde­pend­ent that I have a lot of hope they’ll be the first ones in Ire­land to get it right. While the var­ied attempts show poten­tially chan­ging pri­or­it­ies or invest­ments, there is cer­tainly no doubt that they are very will­ing to try any­thing and everything. The pic­ture above and below are examples of some­thing you can find on the Inde­pend­ent’s web­site, some­thing called the “Digital Edi­tion.” It’s very much like the ePa­per approach, where you have the full scan of the page and you have to zoom, pinch and pan around to read any stor­ies. Def­in­itely an odd take, but one way it might be use­ful would be if you could down­load it. As I have a long flight back to the US tomor­row, if I didn’t have an iPad, I might con­sider zip­ping up a paper in this format and sav­ing it to my desktop to read the next day.

I men­tioned above that for me, the real value here is not down­load­ing a zip file of large image scans of news, but in see­ing the work that The Irish Inde­pend­ent are invest­ing in to find­ing the best strategy and execut­ing it. I have high hopes for their future digital attempts and will keep a close eye on them.

THEIRISHEXAMINER

The Irish Exam­iner is a pub­lic­a­tion of Thomas Cros­bie Hold­ings Lim­ited. It was formerly The Cork Exam­iner and then The Exam­iner, and it has been around since 1841 when it was foun­ded by John Fran­cis Maguire. I couldn’t find any inform­a­tion on when they star­ted their digital pres­ence unfor­tu­nately, the Wiki­pe­dia entry is a bit thin.

At first glance, the front page of http://irishexaminer.com looks cleaner and less cluttered than other Irish news web­sites. There is a lot of white space and less “cram­ming” than many other front pages. The num­ber of advert­ise­ments at the top of the page, though, is a bit dis­tract­ing. Look­ing at the above image, the myhome advert­ise­ment on the right is out­side of the width of the rest of the con­tent, which makes it feel odd or mis­placed, and the top NIB ban­ner ad also feels like it’s in a frame out­side of the page. The Office365 ad appears slightly more nor­mal inside the page with the rest of the content.

The Irish Exam­iner does not have an iPhone or iPad app, but they do use the same “Digital Edi­tion” sys­tem that The Irish Inde­pend­ent are using. Lets agree that we don’t need to cover that anymore.

Vis­it­ing http://m.irishexaminer.com res­ults in a server not found error, how­ever on their Mobile link, they men­tion http://m.examiner.ie which resolves to a very bare but usable page with an Irish Exam­iner logo at the top, three top news story links and some addi­tional links to Break­ing News, Ire­land, World, Sport, etc. Not the most beau­ti­ful page but it is easier to use than try­ing to look at http://www.irishexaminer.com on your phone.

I see a little in The Irish Exam­iner that I do in The Irish Inde­pend­ent: an intent to build some­thing use­ful, the accept­ance that news is mov­ing online and that they need to do some­thing about it. But I also see some con­fu­sion, some budget con­straints and some trep­id­a­tion in invest­ing too much time and money in an unsure area.

WHOELSE?

Am I miss­ing someone who is doing some­thing really fant­astic with digital news in Ire­land? There are a lot of regional news­pa­pers, so I’m going through them all, but if you have seen some­thing great that you enjoy using or hope other news sources adopt, please leave a com­ment or let me know.